Ivory Coast
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58 free Ivory Coast trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Ivory Coast trivia quiz covers Côte d'Ivoire from top to bottom: the Portuguese traders who named the coast, the Kong Empire and the Baoulé kingdoms, French rule from Grand-Bassam, Félix Houphouët-Boigny's thirty-three years and his 'Ivorian miracle', the two civil wars, and the country's grip on the world cocoa market. There is plenty of culture too: the basilica bigger than St Peter's, attiéké and alloco, zouglou and coupé-décalé, Alpha Blondy, and the Elephants of Drogba and Yaya Touré. The opening questions suit anyone who has watched a World Cup; the later ones test people who know why the flag is orange and where the country's highest peak is. Every question is multiple choice with a short explanation after you answer. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which city has been the official capital of Ivory Coast since 1983?
Yamoussoukro
Yamoussoukro was named the capital in 1983, but the transfer went so slowly that most of the government stayed put in the old capital on the coast.
Q 02Which port city is Ivory Coast's largest city and economic centre?
Abidjan
Abidjan was cut off from the sea by a sandbar until a canal opened its lagoon to ocean ships, and it soon became the main port and financial centre of French-speaking West Africa.
Q 03As of 2023, Ivory Coast was the world's largest exporter of which commodity?
Cocoa beans
Cocoa beans have come at a cost: most of the country's forest has been cleared within living memory, with cocoa plantations the leading cause.
Q 04Which Ivorian midfielder was named African Footballer of the Year four years running, from 2011 to 2014?
Yaya Touré
Yaya Touré won all four while at Manchester City, where his goals from midfield helped the club end a 44-year wait for the English league title in 2012.
Q 05In the 1970s Ivory Coast overtook which neighbour as the world's top grower of its main crop?
Ghana
Ghana had long led the world, but its harvests fell sharply in the 1970s as ageing, diseased trees and low prices paid to farmers took their toll, and its neighbour moved ahead.
Q 06European traders named West African shores after their main goods, so what was Liberia's coast called?
Pepper Coast
Pepper Coast came from melegueta pepper, the 'grains of paradise' traded there, which is why the same shore was also known as the Grain Coast.
Q 07In the 1980s, Ivory Coast's government asked other countries to stop doing what to its name?
Translating it
Translating it had given the country a different name in every language, so the government asked for Côte d'Ivoire everywhere, though outlets such as the BBC kept saying Ivory Coast.
Q 08Who was the first president of Ivory Coast, ruling from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993?
Félix Houphouët-Boigny
Félix Houphouët-Boigny was a doctor and wealthy planter who entered politics in 1944 by organising African farmers against rules that favoured European settlers.
Q 09In 1946, a French law named after Ivory Coast's future first president abolished what across France's African colonies?
Forced labour
Forced labour had sent villagers to work on roads and European plantations, and the deputy's own planters' union had demanded its abolition since 1944.
Q 10Black and White in Color, which won Ivory Coast an Oscar in 1977, is set during which war?
World War I
World War I news arrives months late at a remote French outpost in this satire. Its director was French, but the film was co-produced and shot in Ivory Coast, so it was entered under that country's flag.
Q 11Guinness lists Ivory Coast's Basilica of Our Lady of Peace as what?
Largest church in the world
Largest church in the world on its completion in 1989, it was built at the first president's wish and then handed to the Vatican as a gift.
Q 12Which pope consecrated Ivory Coast's Basilica of Our Lady of Peace?
John Paul II
John Paul II agreed to consecrate it only if a hospital was built nearby; he blessed the first stone in 1990, but the hospital opened some 25 years later.
Q 13Ivory Coast's Basilica of Our Lady of Peace was inspired by which famous church?
St Peter's in Rome
Q 21Which former IMF official won Ivory Coast's disputed 2010 presidential election?
Alassane Ouattara
Alassane Ouattara had been kept out of the 1995 and 2000 races by rules on candidates' parentage, and in 2010 his victory led to four months of fighting before he could govern.
Q 22Which former Ivorian president was the first former head of state taken into International Criminal Court custody?
Laurent Gbagbo
Laurent Gbagbo was arrested in 2011 after refusing to accept defeat in the 2010 election, but the court acquitted him of all charges in 2019 and he flew home in 2021.
Q 23Which president promoted 'Ivoirité' in the 1990s to exclude a rival with northern parents from the presidency?
St Peter's in Rome took 120 years to build, while its Ivorian echo, with a similar dome and colonnaded plaza, went up in about four.
Q 14The Ivorian flag is a vertical tricolour of which colours, from hoist to fly?
Orange, white, green
Orange, white, green was adopted in 1959 as three stripes echoing the French Tricolour, a design the flag scholar Whitney Smith tied to the country's closeness to France.
Q 15The Ivorian flag closely resembles, in reverse, the flag of which European country?
Ireland
Ireland's flag is the same tricolour reversed, so when an Ivorian sprinter won world indoor gold in 2018 with no flag to hand, she borrowed one from Irish fans and turned it round.
Q 16The Ivory Coast national football team is nicknamed after which animal?
Elephants
Elephants also head the national coat of arms, as the country's largest animal and the one whose ivory gave it its name.
Q 17Ivory Coast won the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations on home soil by beating which team in the final?
Nigeria
Nigeria led at half-time, but the hosts won 2–1 with a late goal from Sébastien Haller, who had been diagnosed with cancer only 19 months earlier.
Q 18As of 2025, who is the Ivory Coast national team's all-time leading goalscorer, with 65 goals?
Didier Drogba
Didier Drogba is best remembered at Chelsea for the 2012 Champions League final, where he headed a late equaliser and then scored the winning penalty in the shootout.
Q 19After Ivory Coast qualified for the 2006 World Cup, its players knelt on television and begged the warring sides to do what?
Lay down their weapons
Lay down their weapons and hold elections was the plea the team's star striker made from the dressing room in Sudan, and in 2007 he helped move a home qualifier to the rebels' capital.
Q 20At the 2026 World Cup, Ivory Coast first did what?
Reaching the knockouts
Reaching the knockouts had escaped the team in three group-stage exits from 2006 to 2014, the last to a stoppage-time Greek penalty; in 2026 it finally made the round of 32.
Henri Konan Bédié
Henri Konan Bédié's parentage rule kept his main rival out of the 1995 election, and four years later he was toppled in the first coup in the country's history.
Q 24After the failed 2002 coup, rebels made which city, Ivory Coast's second largest, their headquarters?
Bouaké
Bouaké stayed in rebel hands for years while French and UN peacekeepers held a ceasefire line between the rebel north and the government south.
Q 25How did France respond when an Ivorian airstrike killed nine of its soldiers in 2004?
Destroyed its air force
Destroyed its air force: French troops wrecked the jets and helicopters on the ground the same day, and the anti-French riots that followed saw more than 4,500 foreigners flown out.
Q 26Which UNESCO World Heritage site was the French colonial capital of Ivory Coast in the 1890s?
Grand-Bassam
Grand-Bassam lost the role after a yellow fever epidemic in 1899 killed most of its European residents, and its faded colonial quarter is what UNESCO listed in 2012.
Q 27The Muslim trading city of Kong in northern Ivory Coast was destroyed in the 1890s by which resistance leader?
Samori Ture
Samori Ture destroyed Kong while carving out a new empire in the north, but the French captured him in 1898 and sent him into exile in Gabon, where he died two years later.
Q 28Ivory Coast's Baoulé and Agni kingdoms were founded by migrants fleeing which empire to the east?
The Ashanti
The Ashanti succession struggle drove Queen Abla Pokou and her followers west to found the Baoulé kingdom; in legend she gave up her infant son so they could cross a river.
Q 29The Ivorian coastal towns of San-Pédro and Sassandra were named by sailors from which country?
Portugal
Portugal's sailors reached this coast in the 1470s and named its river mouths for Saints Peter and Andrew, which is why two towns in a French-speaking country carry such names.
Q 30Ivory Coast's one long-distance railway runs north from its main port to which landlocked neighbour's capital?
Ouagadougou
Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso, which has no coast, so the single track is its rail route to the sea, with about half the line on each side of the border.